10.23.03 - 9:30 a.m.

it's a bad day. a very bad day. one hour into the day, and i'm sitting at the computer, crying and staring out the window.

all of this could have been averted, but i suspect the frustration, annoyance and stress of that small idiocy (i wanted to shout, it isn't my f'ing fault. it wasn't my f'ing fault. there is only so much i can do. she didn't ask. she won't let me ask. there is nothing i can do. all that, into the phone. but i can't, so i look like a mindless idiot incapable of getting things together in a timely fashion for a simple deposition. and the worst part: all of that is true. it wasn't my f'ing fault. the delay was caused by one person's apparent inability to send a wee little email despite my repeated requests that said person do so. now i have to make a series of unpleasant calls, and tell someone who was planning to travel all day to be here tomorrow that, no, it's off at the last minute. this is an entirely unpleasant prospect, sure, but it shouldn't be enough to have me sitting here, crying, avoiding all semblance of work.

actually, i guess i'm not crying anymore. i'm writing and i'm staring out the window at the sky, the oval boundary of mountains - bah, hills - gray in the distance. in the foreground, individual trees, flame-colored.

i'm not sure what to do with this. what to do with any of this: the clouds, no longer gray, now fluffy and white, dotting the sky to the receding horizon like flying buffalo. no, really: the clouds look like a herd of clouds, and i can anthropomorphize them so easily, as long as the sun shines against their crests and shadows darken their bellies, the winter sun.

i need a change. the house is my change. i think that change has to precede all others. or something. i'm not sure, but i do know this: i'm hypersensitive to my environment. i'm hypersensitive, period, canary in a modern coal mine, even if no one really knows it. i know how to swallow sorrow.

and how do you swallow sorrow? you can't do it piecemeal. you can't inhale it whole. it'll lodge in your throat, like a stone against your heart, thick and heavy, obstructing every breath, every labored contraction of your myocardium. you have to nibble it, like a mouse nibbles cheese. time goes on, you get wiser. adolescent passions and idiocies still move you, but instead of lingering like an angry cartoon cloud over a particularly sour little stick figure, they flare up like a grease fire, flash like lightning on the horizon, then disappear as quickly.

and so, you take it one day at a time, even if you're not sure anymore how to move through your days. even if the extraordinary number of them - before you and behind you - scares you to death, even if the little hollows you've worn out in the cozy quotidian no longer seem so comfortable.

so, it's later, and i'm not crying anymore, and the unpleasant things i had to do were not as dauntingly unpleasant as they seemed when i couldn't not cry, and the clouds no longer looking like a herd of flying buffalo, but rather a school of those flying dog-like things from the neverending story, sleek heads flattened against the headwind, bodies curved and sculpted by their airspeed, streaming through the sky like colorless chinese dragons.

i just don't know what i'm doing anymore.